April 15, 2009

Dragonball Evolution is even worse than its trailer promised. Devoid of the whimsical, folkloric comedy of the TV and comic book series Dragon Ball, upon which it was based, or of the grandiose martial arts spectacle of its successor, Dragon Ball Z, James Wong's live-action adaptation of Akira Toriyama's media franchise falls flat on its face. It's too distant from its source material to please even those anime and manga fans who will be desperate to enjoy it, and it's too stupid for the eight-year-olds who will walk into the theater lacking any knowledge of Goku's prior adventures. It is utterly without ambition, without humor or seriousness, without creativity. Its alterations to the old Dragon Ball are both inexplicable and tragically predictable.

I don't think any eight-year-old will even be able to make much sense of the plot. I am 21, and I spent much of my childhood watching Dragon Ball, and I couldn't make sense of it. It doesn't have much to do with the original story, aside from the presence of certain characters and, of course, the Dragonballs themselves. Goku, Master Roshi, Chi Chi, Bulma, Yamcha, Mai, and Piccolo are all here, and the plot mostly revolves around them chasing after the seven Dragonballs, which, once gathered in the same place, will grant their collector one wish. Piccolo is evil in some complicated way, and vague intimations of the apocalypse pop up here and there.

Goku, naturally, is our hero, but he's not the Goku we once knew. Gone are his unflappable confidence and cheerful serenity. He has been transformed into a bashful, insecure high school student, bullied by jocks because, despite his exemplary martial arts abilities, his grandfather has made him promise not to fight the other boys. Chi Chi, for whom he harbors a silent crush, attends the same high school, and the two of them exchange dialogue borrowed from a Disney Channel Original Movie.

Wong seems to be aiming for the feel of a Transformers, where a normal, slightly dorky kid is thrust into an extraordinary adventure. But the adventure really isn't very extraordinary, and it doesn't seem to know where it should go. It doesn't work as a high-tech sci-fi extravaganza or as a mystical kung-fu journey or as fast-paced Jet Li chopsocky. The special effects are lousy (Piccolo's makeup and the dragon itself are shamefully underwheming), the journey is nonsensical (particularly the interlude at the volcano, which really comes out of nowhere), and the fights are unspectacular. The climax consists of a Saiyan transformation of the kind that fans of the show know well, but here an Oozaru is simply a large actor in an ape costume. This is precisely how it should have been handled if Dragon Ball had been adapted in the 1950s.

Justin Chatwin makes for an awfully puny Goku; it's hard to take him seriously as a fighter. The rest of the cast, which includes Emmy Rossum and James Marsters, doesn't have enough to do. Joon Park's cartoonish cool as Yamcha is particularly charmless, but I sort of enjoyed Chow Yun-Fat's ebulliently hammy Master Roshi. And I liked the film's urban approximation of Roshi's desert-island hut. It's the only imaginative visual in a movie that should have been full of them.

I read on Wikipedia that screenwriter Ben Ramsey was paid $500,000 for the script of Dragonball Evolution, which blows my mind a little, since I can't imagine it took him more than two nights to complete. After the movie, Tony, Abe, and I spent an hour talking about all the things that could have been in the movie, all the characters and storylines from the manga that we would have loved to see come to life. Even the best possible version of Dragon Ball would have made for a pretty strange motion picture, but the high-spirited, comic magic of Goku's childhood or the high-flown, operatic, action-packed absurdity of his adulthood might have been memorable on the big screen. What we have instead is an adolescent incoherence-by-numbers.

The final scene sets up a sequel. Having grossed only $4.76 million in its opening weekend, it won't get one. Since there is no Shen Long in our world to revive dead movie franchises, Hollywood probably will never take another shot at Dragon Ball. That doesn't sound so bad -- who wants another movie like this one? -- but part of me is actually disappointed. I'm still vaguely hoping for Dragonball Z Evolution. Can someone please go Super Saiyan next time? Can't something be super?

April 14, 2009

Eminem is finally ready to release a new album next month. It's called Relapse, and it's his first since 2004. The first single, "We Made You," and its accompanying music video premiered last week.

I like it, which surprises me. I don't think I'd ever liked an Eminem song before. I've listened to only one of his CDs all the way through (it was The Marshall Mathers LP), and I know him more from his radio hits, which were unavoidable when I was in middle school.

As I recall, his singles were characterized by two alternating styles -- manic, vulgar, celebrity-spoofing comedy ("My Name Is," "The Real Slim Shady," "Without Me") and confessional, moody, self-righteous introspection ("The Way I Am," "Cleanin' Out My Closet," "Sing for the Moment"). Neither appealed to me -- Eminem could rap with awesome agility and yet do nothing for me. It was a problem of voice (I still regard his as among the most unpleasant in all music) and personality (especially in his prickly, sullen, self-serious mode).

"We Made You" is not much different from the first group of songs I mentioned, and I wonder if I'm not more sympathetic now simply because Eminem is no longer as ubiquitous as he once was. I don't remember how I felt about "The Real Slim Shady" the first time I heard it, but I remember how I felt about it the 500th time.

Now, after four or five years, I'm actually sort of pleased to run into Eminem again. He's probably a little old to be clowning around as he does here, but he's in good form on the microphone, and it's fun to see him hamming it up in the video, disguised as Tony Romo, Elvis, and Spock. I don't watch enough TV to understand all the jokes (MTV has a helpful guide to the pop-culture references), and most of the jokes I do understand aren't particularly funny, but they're kind of charming for their sheer puerility. The majority of the parodies in the video are entirely inexplicable (why Rain Man?), which makes me like them more. Most of all, the "Lord help us, he's back in his pink Alf shirt!" line won me over.

I imagine the next single will be a dirge about Proof's death or Eminem's most recent divorce from Kim, and any desire I may have to listen to his forthcoming album will vanish. But for now, the exuberant, lowbrow silliness of "We Made You" represents, to me, the closest he's ever come to being likable.

April 13, 2009

Dragonball Evolution grossed a meager $4.76 million at the box office over the weekend. I didn't get a chance to contribute to this total, but I plan to watch and review the movie soon enough. It looks awful, but its existence is weirdly important to me. I explained my history with Dragon Ball in a Mountain Times column last summer, and I thought I might republish it here to provide some background for my forthcoming review of the film:

"Enter the Dragon"

Childhood obsessions are difficult enough to understand at the height of their intensity. From the distance of a decade, one’s schoolboy interests look like trances from which one has thankfully emerged, and one remembers as much of their allure as if one had been drawn to them while under a magician’s spell, asleep the whole time. Yet there is a compulsion to examine these fixations. Why did I waste a year on that particular video game, which now seems so shoddy? Why could I think only about that one girl, whom I hardly knew, when, to judge by the old yearbook, she looked roughly the same as nearly every other girl in the class? One senses that one’s understanding of one’s present state may be aided by an understanding of one’s earlier state; one studies the gestation period to get a better grasp of the final product.

Of the various manias that afflicted me during elementary and middle school, a Japanese cartoon called “Dragon Ball Z” was by far the most powerful and by far the one I’m least inclined to admit today to having liked. Anime is the geekiest interest I’ve ever had; girls seem to have been programmed to roll their eyes whenever it’s mentioned and to try to make anyone who brings it up feel like a character from “Revenge of the Nerds.” And when those over the age of forty, having enjoyed the wholly realistic car-racing anime “Speed Racer” in their youth, hear the premise of “Dragon Ball Z,” they acquire the nonplussed look that those over sixty exhibit when someone tries to explain to them what Facebook is. Unsavory memories of their children’s “Pokémon” phase bubble up in the back of their throat.

By this I mean that, to those who haven’t heard of “Dragon Ball Z,” it’s impossible for me to describe it without giving the impression that I must have been a lunatic for having liked it, even at age 10. The story, based loosely on the classical Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” originated as a comic by Akira Toriyama, eventually spawning three television series and seventeen animated feature films. Its plot, starting with the original “Dragon Ball,” concerns an alien boy named Son Goku, who possesses a magical staff and travels on a cloud before learning to fly on his own. He comes from the planet Vegeta and belongs to a race called the Saiyans, who usually have impressively spiked black hair, except when they reach a state of tremendous physical power, at which point their hair turns blond and they become Super Saiyans. As the series begins, Goku is on a quest to find the seven magical Dragon Balls, which together will grant their collector one wish. Over the course of the story, Goku travels to various planets, makes many friends, gets married, has two sons, and fights a multitude of spectacular battles, mostly against other aliens. I cannot say exactly why I liked it: It started as a lowbrow comedy and evolved into a turgid, overwrought martial-arts soap opera, in which whole episodes passed solely by cutting back and forth between the stares and grimaces of two foes who hated each other’s guts and expressed it by looking at each other intensely for hours. This was captivating.

Roughly all of the “Dragon Ball” franchise is now available in America on DVD in its original Japanese with English subtitles and in a dub, but when in about 1997 my cousin introduced me and my brother Tony to the cartoon, this wasn’t the case. A few episodes had been dubbed and bowdlerized for American TV, but the rest of the show remained in limbo. Luckily, a friend of mine also became addicted to the cartoon, and he found a dealer of bootleg video cassettes of “DBZ,” as it was called. I was, at the time, largely unaware of copyright laws, but the videos were of such poor quality that it may have actually been legal to sell them, as authorities would have been hard-pressed to determine that what appeared on the screen really was “Dragon Ball Z” and not a sequence of abstract paintings. I still have no idea who this seller was, but after my friend’s first purchase went through successfully, Tony and I occasionally contacted the anonymous merchant via AOL Instant Messenger (the preferred system of a classy vendors worldwide!) to request tapes, which he then sent to us in the mail. The subtitles were hard to read, unless there weren’t any subtitles, but no matter – Tony and I watched the cartoon in seven-hour blocks.

In 1998, the obsession reached a point where, in search of some outlet, I founded a website called “The Dragonball Zone,” having recently learned the basics of website design. What began as a jumble of incoherent enthusiasm, whimsical fonts, garish backgrounds, and haphazardly interspersed images evolved, after some hard work, into something slightly less awful, as I stayed up late to develop the website and learned to write HTML. In some ways, I regard this as the beginning of the phase of life in which I remain engrossed today, where nearly every bit of work I’ve done has been forged under the bluish glow of a computer screen in the hours past midnight. Since there was in America a burgeoning community of fans but few online resources available to them, my site had, by 1999, found considerable popularity, receiving hundreds more hits per day than my blog does now. Tony built a similar website, which achieved equivalent renown.

“The Dragonball Zone” disappeared sometime early in the new millennium, along with my passion for the show itself. The spell wore off, for which I’m glad, but when I encounter another former fan, I find myself happily reminiscing, and the conversation always implants a desire to revisit my old heroes. Now I’ve discovered that a live-action “DBZ” movie is in the works in Hollywood. I hope I will be able to maintain my self-control.

I don't think I was aware at the time that Justin Chatwin would play Goku.

April 08, 2009

April 07, 2009

My hometown -- East Brunswick, New Jersey -- has not produced many celebrities. Next door, South River has Joe Theismann, and Sayreville has Jon Bon Jovi. We have Heather O'Reilly, a soccer player who has won two gold medals, and Josh Miller, a punter who has won a Super Bowl. They're successful athletes, but one is a soccer player, and the other is a punter, if you see what I mean.

I think our own Jesse Eisenberg, the star of Adventureland, may have just eclipsed both in fame. Adventureland, directed by Superbad's Greg Mottola, is a sweet coming-of-age story, predictable but not stupid. It grossed only $5.72 million in its opening weekend, but it received admiring reviews for its low-key charm, its sensitivity, and its performances, including Eisenberg's.

He's a diminutive, unassuming performer, projecting a bashful intelligence and wit beneath his mop of curly hair. He has appeared on the big screen as far back as 2002, but this is the first time he's received top billing in a major movie. I suspect he'll have a long career in roles turned down by Michael Cera. (His younger sister, by the way, starred in a series of really annoying Pepsi ads in the late '90s, and when I was in fifth grade, his mother directed my elementary school's play, in which I had no lines.)

In Adventureland, Eisenberg plays James Brennan, who graduates from Oberlin at the start of the film. The year is 1987, and James plans to head to Europe for the summer and then to Columbia for grad school. But when his father receives a demotion at work, James's vacation is cancelled, and since his parents will no longer be able to help pay his rent in the fall, he needs a job. With a B.A. in comparative literature and renaissance studies, he doesn't have many options, so he ends up handing out stuffed animals at Adventureland, a crummy amusement park in his native Pittsburgh, photographed here as a mixture of middle-class tackiness and industrial ruin. I've never been there, but I think it must be better than the film makes it out to be.

We know that this three-month interregnum at Adventureland will turn out to be that one crucial summer for the young man, and James does all the usual things that young men in movies and novels do during those crucial summers in which adolescents turn into adults -- smoke pot, defy Mom and Dad, fall in love, have sex, gain a greater understanding of life. Now I'm not sure if Hollywood's adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh ever needs to be released.

The girl with whom he falls in love is Em (Kristen Stewart), a mysterious NYU student who works beside James at the game booths. She's having an affair with handsome, married Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the park's maintenance man. Also at Adventureland are Joel (Martin Starr), a sardonic, bespectacled enthusiast of Russian literature; Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), the eternally dancing bombshell desired by the park's entire male staff; and Friggo, who cheerfully punches James in the testicles roughly once a day. Adventureland is owned by a married couple played by two of Saturday Night Live's funnier cast members, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, whose Bobby and Paulette genuinely like their line of work.

It's an amusing enough cast of characters, and Mottola's comic creations reliably supplement the earnest drama that characterizes the rest of the film without distracting from it or cheapening it. Em -- whose romance with James, except in one late scene, is handled with a little more nuance than we expect from this sort of movie -- is refreshingly free of the kooky, Juno-like qualities that often plague the young women in films who exist to bring inexperienced sad sacks out of their shells. Joel, the resident dork, is actually smart and likable, and even Connell is less villainous than he might be. Only James's and Em's parents, losers who alienate and depress their children at every turn, seem stuck in a film less humane than this one.

Mottola lends the movie a nice summertime pace; it's suitably baggy and langorous without ever really dragging. He also resists succumbing to nostalgia. The '80s are present, but they're not overemphasized or played for cheap laughs.

For me, coming-of-age films tend to disappoint because so few of them are willing to admit how much of growing up is not a love story, has nothing to do with love. Adventureland doesn't explore any new territory, but it's quite adequate in what it sets out to do. And until I win the Nobel Prize, I can tolerate Jesse Eisenberg as the face of East Brunswick.